Posted
by
timothy
on Monday September 24, 2012 @04:07AM
from the as-do-we-all dept.

angry tapir writes "A California jury may have awarded Apple more than US$1 billion in damages in late August when it triumphed over Samsung in a hard-fought case over smartphone and tablet patents, but the iPhone maker is coming back for more: late last week it asked for additional damages of $707 million. The request includes an enhanced award of $535 million for willful violation of Apple's designs and patents, as well as about $172 million in supplemental damages based on the fact that the original damages were calculated on Samsung's sales through June 30."

I didn't think Apple was doing that badly that they have to litigate others for cash to stay relevant. Oh wait, maybe they are doing it to make the others strapped for cash! Or wait, maybe there isn't even a point in doing this. Maybe they should all hold hands and be happy instead.:3

This is what happens when you give into a terrorist's demands. You get more demands, closely followed by more terrorists. Blame it on the patent system all you want, it existed for a long time without companies behaving like Apple.

Bull. Infringement actions like this are typical there is nothing unusual here at all legally. Global scale and high degree of usage by consumers makes the numbers large. But really the only thing unusual about these particular infringement actions is you care about the products being disputed and are following the case.

Indeed. I had a friend (actually my ex-wife's brother in law) who worked in a factory. His boss would bring him a widget their competitor had come up with and ask "can we make these?" The first time they asked that he said "sure, but they'll sue for patent infringement." His boss replied "that's why we have a legal department." He said that often, you could build the exact same device and get around the patents by making it out of a different material.

In this story alone we have posts claiming settlement money is needed to keep Apple afloat and Apple are terrorists.

That's just silly. Everyone knows that Apple's just trying to make sure they don't have to compete.

Competition is a pesky thing when you're on top. It's sort of the consumer electronics equivalent of the 1927 Yankees having the entire Philadelphia Athletics team killed on the way to the ball-park.

I mean, you're already 19 games ahead, but a little insurance is always good. And ultimately, it's not about winning, it's about humiliating the competition and making sure you win forever without having to try so hard.

It makes me understand why not everyone is comfortable having a businessman as president.

Samsung in 2011 did $42b in sales and $4.7b in profits. They aren't going to be strapped for cash. On the other hand an award that large would destroy the profitability of their Android strategy. It would turn infringement from a money maker to a money loser.

So the brand of the tards can single handely destroy the worlds biggest mobile maker by ridicilous patent claims?

Awesome.

As if there wasn't reason enough to think bad about the people buying Apple products. Or the actual Apple products. Or Apple.

In all honesty though I assume they could raise their prices to afford paying for this or proper licenses, eventually losing part of their position on the market but if that's how it should be then fine

So in a "perfect socialist (substitute communism or whatever other "planned economy" belief you hold)" all the dogs in your cage would starve because there isn't enough food for any of them when it gets equally portioned out? This assumes that capitalism has anything to do with crony capitalism which it doesn't (other than a similarity of name). It also assumes that capitalism is a zero-sum game, which it isn't and never has been. Putting aside all of these gross generalizations. Lets take your analogy

Very simple, actually. Capitalism with limits. You put a floating cap on profits, tied to measures such as the crime rate and the wealth gap; and put a cap on personal wealth. It doesn't have to be a low cap, say $20 million dollars. Or $50 million. Fuck, make it an even $100 million dollars and raise it every year with inflation.
Then watch society transform.

A cap on wealth? All this will do is turn the creative into criminals and increase nepotism.. I've reached my cap where do I put the money now? Oh my maybe its time for my nephew to open up a 10 million dollar company! Do you see how this works? And if they clamp down on this? Then our best and brightest will all be in jail or wasting time finding further loopholes, sounds like a productive thing for society?

Don't propose unnecessarty laws and restrictions for which you do not understand the consequences.

I thought about something similar a long time ago: in a company the highest salary (+bonuses+shares) cannot be over X times the lowest salary, X being a number best determined by economic models or trial and errors. And recently I have been surprised to hear politicians begin to use this or similar ideas. I recently heard Mélenchon, head of the french Front de Gauche which has 20% support, suggest this very idea, with X=5.

In a similar vein, if you redistribute the wealth in the US so that X=5 for the

That would just encourage more outsourcing. Any low paid jobs would be handled by company x. Possibly the executives will work for both companies and still make the same money so you don't even really end up screwing them just adding more bureaucracy.

We need to stop focusing on what other people as a means of justifying our lives or happiness. It doesn't make things better and it just makes everyone bitter (there is always someone unfairly/fairly doing better than you.)

There's a fair bit of research showing that well-being is related inversely to the difference in income between the richest and poorest people in a society. The smaller the difference, the better off people are.

Interesting. Someone who has hit the wealth ceiling would have to spend his money in order to get more. But then, isn't what he buys with that money also counted as wealth? I see the following difficulties here: one would have to keep track of ALL possessions in order to see when someone has hit the ceiling or not, sounds like a lot of bookkeeping and much room for abuse (wealthy people trying to hide their possessions). And the ones most affected by this scheme would do everything in their power to prevent

If the rich are spending money on things then that's good, it's productive money, going back into the economy, creating jobs, being passed onto others as wages and so forth. Bill Gates buys a $10bn mega-yacht with built on runway and plane included and that's thousands of staff who will be employed producing that yacht. Those people get a few years of well paid employment, Bill gets a mega-yacht at the end of it. It's win-win.

The problem isn't this sort of rich person, it's the hoarders who are the issue. They literally have hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions doing absolutely nothing other than generating more money for themselves. It's not productive, it doesn't create jobs, it makes society poorer - it literally drains money out of society and turns it into an arbitrary number with which said hoarder makes up for his small penis or whatever traumatic issue that made him that way does - that's the problem that needs to be dealt with.

Imagine you have a set of people living around a lake, living off of it for food and water. That's great, until one day one guy thinks you know what? I'm going to drain the lake and store it in my back garden in a massive sealed area no one can get to. That's great, he's taken all the water himself, well done, he wins, but everyone around him is then desperate for water, so their only option is to break in to his compound - commit crime, to get what they need to live. The point is the guy may have got an ego boost at having the most water around, but society itself has suffered greatly as a result.

So I live in the UK, the US dollar is trading at 2 USD to 1 GBP, and I buy Â£1million worth giving me $2million. The recession happens and the value of the pound drops to 1.4 USD to 1 GBP and I buy back pounds with my US dollars. I then end up with ~Â£1.4mill.

There are any number of ways to grow a pile of money without actually investing it into anything of value. Even in the investment market itself there are any number of schemes to grow income without the invested money actually act

So when a company or an individual hits your cap will they keep producing or will they stop. If they are as heartless as you make them out to be they will just stop and everyone working for them will have the rest of the year off.

If mankind thought the same way you do we would still be banging rocks in each other's heads.

Although I don't agree with him he does have a point and is willing to discuss it, if you had an IQ bigger than 100 instead of shutting communication with irony and insult you would try to encourage it.

The idea isn't stupid, it's just one that will fail and at the same time expose the 1 percent for the greedy fuckers they really are when they stomp on it.

The rich should be taxed simply because they can afford it, and the worst a rich person could do is be brought down to be equal to the second richest person after him, and if that's not enough both of them only go down to tie with number 3, and so on. The worst that could happen is that they float down from heaven enough for us to see them, and all of us

Mind you, I'd rather government be this magical free thing that nobody has to pay for. But cops, judges, tax collectors, municipal plumbers, soldiers, mayors, senators, councilors, sheriffs, and even prison wardens have to eat too, and every hour they spend on the job of government that they then cannot spend in the private sector has to be compensated.

So the question is, who should pay for this burden?

I'd rather tax the rich simply because they can afford it. The worst that can happen to the number 1 rich man is that he gets down to number 2, and if the government needs more money they both go down to number 3, who joins them on the trip down to number 4, and so on until the government's "civilized society bill" gets paid. There is a LONG way down before a rich man starts truly suffering poverty, or even inconvenience. Until he actually comes up short on something he needs or wants BESIDES being richer than someone else, he's got more money than he can use.

And that's assuming a 100 percent tax on the top bracket, which doesn't even have to be the case.

Yup, I share your sentiment. Apple is increasingly becoming a downright scary company, Perhaps *all* their staff should watch those "think different" ads again. The company seems to be almost aiming for a Big Brother badge these days.

It took this long for people to realize that Apple has never been nothing more than a cut-throat Capitalist company?

Really? Steve Jobs was NEVER a Saint nor was he ever nothing more than Bill Gates (in his Microsoft days) with a "cool veneer".I'm sorry to all you Apple distortion field loving fanboys and girls out there but Steve was ALWAYS a vicious business man.The difference between Jobs and Gates (besides the obvious) is that Gates changed over time and became an amazing philanthropist. Even in Jobs’s dying days he was still cut throat, admirable if you’re a business person but that’s it.

I’m tired of the rhetoric. Apple is just another company that since it’s driving force (Steve) is gone has been reduced to pissing matches with patents.

i used to tell the army of people who ask nerds for advice on purchases to just buy apple because then i wouldnt have to rid them of spyware later. now that apple has taken the douche crown from microsoft, and microsoft has taken the oblivious crown from Sun, and oracle pulled an HP/Compaq/DEC on Sun, and ubuntu started bundling adware, and redhat is no longer relevant... and i intentionally have to break english grammatical protocol to emphasize each element in this never ending list in an annoying attempt

Sorry to all the Apple fanboys out there, but it becomes increasingly hard to feel any sympathies for Apple. Seems that Apple's fame is slowly declining...

Right, because 2 million iPhone 5 pre orders in 24 hours is *clearly* an indication of declining fame.

I got news for you, the general public A) isn't aware of this litigation B) doesn't give a shit.

I'm not going to debate the right or wrong merits of the litigation itself, but if you think this lawsuit has hurt Apple in the court of public opinion, you're not capable of looking at the issue objectively.

Right, because 2 million iPhone 5 pre orders in 24 hours is *clearly* an indication of declining fame.

Given 1.3 million Android registrations per day, Apple aren't even holding parity on launch events.

Ok, let's do some simple logic -
#1 - That includes tablets
#2 - That includes all Android suppliers, not just one manufacturer. If Samsung sells a brand new Android phone, HTC doesn't see a cent of that money. Apple gets a cut of *every* new iPhone sold. So not only do the Android manufacturers have to compete with Apple, they have to compete with each other... just like Apple.
#3 - While people may be buying Android devices, the usage numbers show iOS well in the lead. To me, that says people are buyin

Sorry to all the Apple fanboys out there, but it becomes increasingly hard to feel any sympathies for Apple. Seems that Apple's fame is slowly declining...

Right, because a stock price that's still over $700/share and 2 million pre orders for the iPhone 5 in 24 hours is clearly an indication of declining fame.
Most people don't know about or care about this litigation. They just know Apple makes stuff they like.
I don't like alot of the things Apple does as a company, but I like the products they make. I don't like the products that their competitors make, they don't fulfill my needs.
So what am I going to do, refuse to buy Apple out of some sense of moral outrage? Sorry, not going to make myself less productive as a show of support for some other big mega-corp? Samsung is not some innocent bystander getting picked on by the big kid on the block. There's sin enough to go around for *all* players invovled in the smartphone market, so the moral reprehension is pretty much a wash for me.
So in the end it boils down to who has the product I prefer to use. Those are the people who get my money.

Sorry to all the Apple fanboys out there, but it becomes increasingly hard to feel any sympathies for Apple. Seems that Apple's fame is slowly declining...

Right, because a stock price that's still over $700/share and 2 million pre orders for the iPhone 5 in 24 hours is clearly an indication of declining fame.

So you think mere sales figures are a good measure of fame? Sorry, wrong measure -- unless you also believe that Apple was a shitty, fameless company in the 80s and 90s and Microsoft the creme de la creme of software makers during that period...

I think 17% marketshare for Apple vs. 4 times that for Android (68%) runs a steamroller over your argument that "most people" and "the public" believe what you think they believe.

Honestly. If you don't know the figures then stop perpetuating the myth that Apple is somehow the most popular mobile phone manufacturer/OS provider around. It's not, it's not even close.

Apple makes the most profit from smartphones and that's it, they certainly don't have the most support from the public or any such thing. Most people avoid them. Even if you discount the budget end of the Android market and focus on high end flagship products like Samsung's Galaxy Sx series, HTC One X, etc. and the equivalents for all the other manufacturers then even at the high end, that is, the expensive end, far more people are still buying Android and avoiding Apple so it's not even simply Android's budget phones that are driving Android's sales figures vs. Apples, most people just prefer Android devices, most people choose not to buy Apple, it's really that simple.

I don't like the products that their competitors make, they don't fulfill my needs.

Out of curiosity, what do you believe the iPhone can do that a similarly matched Android phone cannot? What do you, in your estimation, "need" that only an iPhone can satisfy? Is it functionality present in iOS or is it software which is exclusive to the iPhone?

The thing is that Apple could get scrutinized like the United Shoe Machinery Company was during the 20th Century. (For those who don't know, United Shoe was sued by the US government starting in the 1940's for abusing patent rights on shoe making machines to eliminate competitors. This litigation eventually wiped out the company.)

I'm not sure if Apple wants to be in that position, given their enormous clout in the touchscreen computing device market with the iPhone and iPad.

Give it 5 more years and Apple's fame will be gone.
Steeve Jobs was intelligent at least but with his loss now Apple is just evil and stupid. Just look at the iOS6 maps fiasco, Jobs would never have let the iPhone5 ship with that junk in it.

Why? What Apple are doing here is driving their share price *up* and Samsung's *down*. It's thinking in the short term: someone somewhere is going to do a run on Apple stock very soon and make a killing, then buy Samsung stock as it floors with half the money. If/when Samsung recover, short that stock and retire obscenely rich either way... only difference between whether Samsung recovers or not is how many lobster testicles you get in your morning mojito.

Bullshit. I am not saying that the Patent dispute is valid. What I am saying is that Apple makes hardware and software and sells it. It is not correct to say that defending their patents is how they make their money. What you are thinking of is a patent troll. You cannot expect any company to ignore patent violations, and you cannot fault any company for refusing to ignore them. Unless that company is a patent troll, any claim that they make their money through patent lawsuits is ridiculous. Apple makes their money by designing and selling computer systems.

"You cannot expect any company to ignore patent violations, and you cannot fault any company for refusing to ignore them."

Well that's exactly how the mobile phone market worked for the two decades before Apple rolled in. Why do you think it can't exist this way when it already did? The only reason it doesn't now is because Apple refused to license the same patents from Nokia that everyone else was willing to license fairly, and for the same fee Nokia was licensing

Apple is a patent troll because the patents they are beating over Samsung's head are bullshit and never should have been issued in the first place. Yet the court grants the USPTO a wide berth of "deference" when the USPTO is already rubber stamping things expecting the courts to clean up THEIR mess.

It's a chicken and egg situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

It's a racket.

And Apple is in on it.

That makes them a patent troll.

Worse yet, you can't get a reexam at the USPTO without shitting your position up in court if you get sued later. According to the law, if you botch a reexam you cannot use prior art as a defense in court.

I'm in a similar boat. I've been buying Macintoshes since the nineties and working on them professionally longer, but when it comes time to upgrade to a new portable workstation, I'm moving to something like HP's beasts.

Since my current MacBook Pro 17" is still very capable, I'm cross-grading all of my pro-applications to Windows that don't have a multiplatform license and plan to be in Bootcamp fulltime before end of the year. This is easy for me, since I used PCs first back in the eighties and never abandoned them, even when I moved on to Macs fulltime -- I still build PCs for gaming and 3D work.

Another area I'm dropping, which is a bit harder to chew on, is IOS development. I'm not going to bother renewing with Apple come next March; but having said that, I deal mostly with enterprise and I noticed a trend towards Android tablets now, so this makes it easier.

This new Apple isn't a company I respect and care to support. It's going to be a bit tougher to get the wife off her Mac, but eventually it will happen.

I've been buying Macintoshes since the nineties and working on them professionally longer, but when it comes time to upgrade to a new portable workstation, I'm moving to something like HP's beasts.

Whatever you do, do not buy an HP. I could go into great detail as to why, but suffice to say that it took me over 24 hours on the phone to get a replacement for an EliteBook with a GPU with a known GPU die bonding problem. You'd be better off with almost anything else, except of course Sony, I hope you know better than that already.

While an individual doesn't send a large message, every little bit helps and just because each individual message isn't large doesn't mean that a flood of them will be small.

It also helps in that Apple is in a positive feedback loop of their stuff being popular because it is popular. Well, the less people who are seen with Apple products, the more it works to break that feedback loop.

I certainly encourage anyone who is angered at Apple's business practices to find other devices. The good news is that it is perfectly doable. There's nothing Apple has I'm aware of that you can't find a workable alternative to.

Now if you like the stuff Apple makes the best and don't care about their actions, fair enough, but "I can't find anything else," isn't a valid point. Android or Windows Mobile phones work real well, tons of companies will supply you with a computer at any price and quality point you wish and so on.

So the parent has the right of it: If you are mad at Apple, don't buy their stuff. Better still, send them a polite e-mail, letting them know. Even better still, let others know why and encourage them to do the same (don't be pushy though).

The real news is Samsung's motion for JMOL or a new trial. This verdict is hopelessly inconsistent and compromised - the statements made by the jury foreman are hard to believe! - that there is no chance of it standing. If sane, Apple would admit that, argue that the verdict should be tossed in it's entirety, so the important points in Samsung's favor are lost as well, and keep it's powder dry for round 2. I'm not holding my breath for that, as they have shown a willingness to argue that the sky is green from day 1.

There is not going to be a new trial. I think Samsung was treated unfairly. On the other hand Samsung also engaged in serious misconduct during discovery.

There are lots of problems with this filing as well. For example Courts have repeatedly denied a monopoly in the copyright context over the GUI design concepts that Apple seeks to protect here. See Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. In Apple v. Microsoft the court never ruled that GUI design concepts weren't protected. The ruled the exact oppo

He's referring to the side show where Apple claimed that Samsung should have guessed earlier than they did that Apple was going to take them to court, and begun preserving evidence. This is contradicted in that Apple also did not begin preserving evidence until after Samsung did. If Apple did not feel that it might take action, how was Samsung to guess? Crystal ball? Examining sheep's livers?As I said, a sideshow. Apple backed off as soon as the judge started making noises that Apple should be punished as well.

1) Samsung engaged in misconduct during discovery.2) Samsung was unable to provide a sound basis for the drastic shifts in their design approach after the iPhone was released3) Some of the elements of copying, like icon styling are rather clear and none have been conceded to, which is likely what led the jury to draw the conclusion of intent. This happens all the time, X lies about his minor part in the crime so the jury decides to believe he's lying because he was a primary.

This has been dealt with. Samsung started preserving evidence before Apple did.

2) Samsung was unable to provide a sound basis for the drastic shifts in their design approach after the iPhone was released

When you include all the phones, not just Apple's selection Samsung's 'before' and 'after' ranges are all rather similar.

3) Some of the elements of copying, like icon styling are rather clear and none have been conceded to, which is likely what led the jury to draw the conclusion of intent. This happens all the time, X lies about his minor part in the crime so the jury decides to believe he's lying because he was a primary.

Well, the icon stylings are standard things that all existed before Apple 'stole' them from previous designs.

That being said I agree with Samsung the punishments effectively allowed Apple to misrepresent the evidence in their presentation. I'd like to see those things tossed.

No real arguments there.Oh, look I've done the 'quote and deny' thing that generally tells me that a conversation is no longer worth reading Oh well.

This has been dealt with. Samsung started preserving evidence before Apple did.

Yes it was dealt with in the trial. I was actually more referring to the F700 evidence.

When you include all the phones, not just Apple's selection Samsung's 'before' and 'after' ranges are all rather similar.

I understand that's what Samsung claimed at trial. And no they weren't. If you look at the F700 it is rather clear that Samsung was chasing after Palm's theory of design, a PDA/phone mixture with calendaring being the

You are full of bullshit. Apple is abusing the system. I don't see Google suing over bing. I don't see Google trying to litigate competition out of the marketplace. And suing over gestures? And icons in a grid? And generally abusing software patents progressively making it impossible to write software without having to spend money on lawyers. The list goes on and on. So its notjust the game it the fucking player that is corrupt. Fuck apple. They won't see another recommendation from me until the

I am posting from a Macbook; while I am not a fan of parts of the Apple company, their engineering is quite excellent.

This is a prefect excmple of why light regulation of companies does not work. The market simply won't make companies behave ethically. It doesn't matter if the company is unethical and evil, people will still buy their stuff.

Apple decided to go nuclear, and it is likely to backfire on them. While the patent system is broken for sure, most other large companies seemed to use stupid patents largely defensively. They'd patent everything under the sun so that if someone came after them, they could counter with thousands of patents and see what stuck. In terms of legit patents, they'd do cross licensing.

Not Apple, they've decided to go nuclear on other players. Sue them for stupid amounts of money, declare nobody can make anything that looks like an Apple product, and so on. They raised the stakes, and thus things are getting nasty.

To be fair, Microsoft and Apple have both been in patent wars with each other and with the rest of us for a long time, Microsoft more than Apple. And it's been over stupid shit. Look and feel? the GUI? Windows? It's not all patents, either. Let's not forget Microsoft's sock puppet SCO (nee Caldera... I don't want to malign the actual pre-Caldera SCO, they were lame in other ways) attacking Linux over bogus copyright. Apple is frankly not a dramatic example of bad behavior, they're just asking for lots of mo

Oh, don't forget ot stick Oracle on there too, just in case you're ever in the kind of position i your company where that matters. Sony hate their customers and randomly lash out out of spite, malice and perhaps ennui. Oracle truly despise their customers and seem to relish the opportunity to carefully devise and execute a plans to harm their customers with a persistence and glee that one can only marvel at.

If I were a shareholder I would be quite worried about the (cr)Apple strategy. IMHO this is a clear signal of lack of innovative ideas. Innovation cannot be a continuos flow and they are reaching their limits. I doubt that the iphone 5 will be a planetary success because of the lack of real innovation in it. It's a sad black thing with infamous rounded corners. It's not appealing neither aestethically nor tecnologically. The competitors do at least the same and also much better. They appear on the descending path.

If they win maybe they can use the proceeds to pay the swiss railway. by the sounds of it apple believes in harsh penalty for wilful violation. Swiss Rail will be very happy to hear apple feels this way.

For most of the guys, *court cases* got to be accepted. *Suing* was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got *sued*. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got sued. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was *bankrupt*. And they were suing each other all the time. Suing people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.

What happened to the concept of a "jury of peers" as in English law (i.e. equals)? If corporations are people in the USA, then the jury in a trial between corporations over technical issues should consist of retired (as in no ax to grind) design engineers with experience of the patent, trademark and design system. This won't happen because they would rapidly expose the ignorance of the lawyers, simply by the questions they would ask. But it would eliminate an awful lot of bad decisions and legal costs.

I think it is a great idea to have technical trials before random experts. I agree with you.

But that's the way regulatory boards are setup. Far fewer court trials and more administrative trials would be a huge benefit. But that requires going back to "bigger government" since the burden on the administrators increases and the burden on the courts decreases.

On one hand, you'd get people more familiar with the issues. On the other hand, if the lawyers can't distill the argument into something a layman can understand then it's a bunch of bullshit legal mumbo-jumbo that they can blow out their arse. On the gripping hand, those experts are a lot easier to pay off ahead of time than a truly random selection of the population.

Maybe what we really need here isn't panels of experts (we do have expert witnesses, any bias will be relatively apparent) but an overhaul of